Patient Education in Pain Management

Original Editor - Sheik Abdul Khadir

Top Contributors - Mike Stewart, Sheik Abdul Khadir, Cecile HoSang, Jo Etherton, Kim Jackson, Michelle Lee, Admin, Yigit Unalan, 127.0.0.1, Claire Campbell, Simisola Ajeyalemi, Lauren Lopez and Jess Bell  

Introduction

To make it simple, the term patient education means "educating the patient " about his health condition. Eventhogh the patient education has been viewed and practiced as a preventive strategy majorly, it includes all the information about the disease/disorder/condition the patient is concerned with.

In pain Management, the patient has to understand exactly what"s hapenning to him/her to tackle with the pain. Pain is recognised as the psycho-somatic entity which necessitates the need for better/thorough understanding from the patient's perspective. Unless the patient is convinced with the information provided, the results may not so good.

• For example, many patients believe the degenration is a disease and needs to be cured. The primary goal of the patient education should be make the patient understand that degeneration is not a disease but a normal aging process and has to be treated with that view

Need

Cost containment studies show that educating patients results in significant savings. Educated patients maintain better health and have fewer complications; as a result, they require fewer hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and clinic and physician visits. As the growth of health care continues to outpace inflation in many countries around the world, health policy makers have increasingly focused their attention on cost containment. Managed care has a major focus on reducing the supply of services. There is increasing attention to lowering health care costs through primary prevention efforts.

 

Factors affecting Patient Education 

1. Inadequate assessment of pain
   
2. Inadequate understanding of how patient perceives his/her pain
   
3. Variations/ differences in the information received. { for example, a patient with knee pain is confused whether to do or avoid activities like cycling and walking due to the differences in the information provided even among health care providers}
4. Life style
5. Cultural barriers.

Requirement 

 The following is important in patient education for pain mangement:

1. Recognise the impact of, and evidence for, the use of therapeutic neuroscience education and self-management as a critical part of pain management.
2. Design and apply appropriate educational strategies based on educational science.
3. Identify the range of educational opportunities available across therapeutic domains (eg, injury, disease, medical and post surgical intervention) with consideration of age, culture and gender.
4. Consider the scope and evidence for/against various contemporary therapeutic educational styles (e.g. biomedical, psychological, neuroscience) and models (e.g stages of change theory) and service delivery modes including face to face, web-based, group education.
5. Identify key variables which may impact on knowledge outcomes for the patient (eg self efficacy, health literacy, co-morbidities, culture), the clinician (eg health professional's pain-related beliefs), the message (e.g. use of multimedia), and the context (e.g. insurance limitations; risk reduction; injury prevention)

Boon Or Bane

It is to be emphsized that sometimes the patient education may prove otherwise. The role of health-care providers is changing quickly, from making decisions for the patients to providing assistance to them in making informed decisions.
Patients are becoming increasingly educated about health related issues, thanks to the World Wide Web. There are patients patients who do not hesitate to argue over complex medical issues without having much knowledge about the same. 

Beware

Patients who have in-depth knowledge of their condition encounter problems when their expertise is seen as inappropriate in standard healthcare interactions, and expertise taught to patients in one branch of medicine can be considered non-compliant by those who are not specialists in that field.Although patient education can give people confidence in their own self-management skills, it cannot solve the power imbalance that remains when a generalist healthcare professional, however well meaning, blocks access to medication and supplies needed to manage chronic diseases successfully. There is a role for those involved in primary and hospital care, including those supporting and training healthcare professionals, to recognise these problems and find ways to acknowledge and respect chronic patients’ biomedical and practical expertise. 

Recent Related Research (from Pubmed)


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